Search results for: "Persistence"

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  2. The Heart to Keep Going
     … Right effort is an essential factor in the path—generating desire, upholding your intent, maintaining your persistence to abandon unskillful qualities that have arisen. Notice that the unskillful qualities are there, and you’re going to do battle with them—you’re going to figure out one way or another to get yourself motivated to stick with the effort. This is one area where … 
  3. Not-self in Context
     … As the Buddha said, when you have a sense of yourself, you have a sense of what talents and skills you’ve developed in terms of conviction, learning, persistence, relinquishment, discernment, and what he calls quick-wittedness—in other words, your use of your intelligence to come up with solutions to problems that haven’t been explained to you. You want to keep tabs … 
  4. Who’s in Charge Here?
     … Who are you going to put in charge inside? When the Buddha talks about the faculties of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, that word “faculty” basically means who’s in charge in the mind. So do your best to put someone good in charge and make them powerful so that they can keep control over everything inside. That’s how your practice develops … 
  5. Attahi Attano Natho
     … So we have to work on this skill—and it’s a skill that requires work, persistent work. It’s not that we jump from being totally unskillful to totally skillful all at once. It’s success by approximation. You work at it and you find yourself getting more and more perceptive, more and more sensitive, more and more discerning as the practice progresses … 
  6. Step by Step
     … The reason we’re commemorating him is because of the good examples he set, primarily in the area of generosity, persistence, and truthfulness. We look back on the history of the world, and there are very few people that really stand out for their goodness, but those who do, stand out because of these qualities. They’re generous with other human beings. They set … 
  7. The End of the World
     … Your goodness is crushed only by your own discouragement, by your own lack of faith, your lack of conviction, lack of persistence. Those are the things that crush you, and yet those are also things you can do something about. The mountains keep moving in, moving in. The world is swept away. It’s the nature of the world. If the north mountain doesn … 
  8. Values of the Noble Ones
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. Those are all good things to develop. You simply have to figure out which ones are appropriate right here and now. If the list of ten is too long, just think, “How about goodwill?” Goodwill is not just a pink-cotton-candy attitude you spread out with cloud machines. It’s basically thinking, “What … 
  9. Meaning & Becoming
     … It includes generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. When you develop these qualities, they take you out. So, if you’re looking for meaning and significance., it doesn’t have anything to do with the relationships you develop, although if you want to find what the Buddha calls an admirable friend, someone to helps you develop these qualities, that’s … 
  10. The Focus on Suffering
     … Analysis of what’s going on in the present moment, persistence, rapture: These are very energizing factors. If your mind is already scattered, it doesn’t help to add more of these things. In other words, the fire’s already too strong, and you keep pouring more and more fuel onto the fire, so of course it gets worse. That’s when you need … 
  11. Defilements Are Real
     … Conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, conviction in the power of action; persistence in trying to give rise to skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones; mindfulness to keep all this in mind, so that the mind can get into concentration and have a sense of its home where it can stay apart from the greed, aversion, and delusion; and then the discernment to take … 
  12. The Skill of Renunciation
     … And two, persistence: You stick with it. The mind slips off, you bring it back. Slips off again, you bring it back again. You don’t get discouraged. But you’re trying to pay full attention. Which is the third quality. So notice, when the mind is about to slip off, what does it do? How does it talk to itself? How does it … 
  13. A Magic Set of Tools
     … The third quality we add is persistence or ardency. Keep with it. No matter how loud the bombs or incessant the crickets, you’re not going to send your attention after them. You know they’re there. You’re not going to deny that they’re there, but they’re simply not places you want to go. You’re going to keep tabs on … 
  14. Feeding on Feeding
     … He just teaches you a new way to eat—the difference here being that as you feed on the path and develop the qualities of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these become strengths. Ultimately, they get so strong that they bring the mind to the point where it doesn’t need to feed anymore. This is the part of the practice that really … 
  15. Learning by Doing
     … your determination to stay here, your strong sense that this is a good thing to be doing right now—good for you, good for the people around you—and the persistence that sticks with it, no matter what. Many of the interesting things that are going to happen in the mind tend to happen when we switch our frame of reference. There’s a … 
  16. Analyzing Anger
     … You take delight in developing your conviction, your persistence, your mindfulness, your concentration, and your discernment. But then when they’ve done their work, you have to see that they, too, are not the goal. They’re the path. So the very final step is to use this five-factor analysis and apply that to the path, too. That’s when you’re really … 
  17. Mental Seclusion
     … It depends on your skill, and skill comes from persistence. You stick with it. If the mind wanders off, you bring it back. If it wanders off again, you bring it back again. Don’t get discouraged. You’re developing new habits in the mind—and you’re raising the level of the mind so that it’s not a slave to the world … 
  18. Living Honorably
     … As long as the mindfulness and concentration are not yet strong, you need other forms of strength, such as conviction and persistence. You’re convinced that this has got to be the way out, this has got to be the way to behave, and this is the noble way to look for happiness. You have to ask yourself: “Are you going to go like … 
  19. Time Well Spent
     … When you’re doing chores around the monastery, it’s an opportunity to train a lot of good qualities, such as persistence, endurance, and determination. You make up your mind you’re going to do a project and you see it through. There’s equanimity when things don’t go well—but it’s not the kind of equanimity that just gives up. It … 
  20. What Right Mindfulness Remembers
     … Then there’s the quality of persistence, which means that you keep at it, but it doesn’t mean you keep pushing yourself up against the wall. You find something good and you stick with it. This is where the quality of respect for concentration comes in, because it’s so easy to think “Well, I can do this anytime, I’ll just leave … 
  21. Energizing Your Meditation
     … The energizing factors are analysis of qualities, persistence, and rapture. Those are the factors you have to emphasize at the beginning of the meditation—especially when you’re tired—holding in mind the perception that, yes, you do have to put some energy in if you’re going to get some energy out. But you have to do it in the right way. Otherwise … 
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